Igano

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Igano – The Land That Wasn’t There

This is a Orientl themed campaign with some of its basic concepts taken from modern Japanese culture and applying them to feudal Japanese setting. The reason for this campaign was that I was dissatisfied with the 3.5 AD&D Oriental Adventures Campaign Setting. While I do like the L5R game world, it really didn’t fit in with what I wanted to do. I was also annoyed with TSR throwing away the Kara-Tur campaign setting in favor of L5R.

I started with a simple story hook that used Kara-Tur to create my world bu then leapfrogged into a new campaign setting. I used the concept of a rebel ninja clan being rounded up and banished from Kara-Tur. The reasons for ths were vast, not the least of which was manipulating political clans into war against one another. Set adrift this clan, called the Iga clan (named after the Historical Iga-ryu ninja clan of Japan), were at sea for 1 month before a tsunami crashed their fleet on the shores of large island landmass. While there were native inhabitants, the Iga clan organized quickly and subsumed the natives, eventually pushing them off their own homeland. From there the Iga began building their own empire. The former natives of what became Igano laid a curse upon the ruling families, that Igano would only endure and prosper so long as the main bloodline remained unbroken.

The Original Igano Campaign

800 years passed and the Empire thrived. The reigning emperor, Kaneda Hiro, was old and without a direct heir. Using this he gathered a band of adventurers to retrieve a lost sword from the period when the Iga first arrived. The band included a Piao-Shih, a low-level Yakuza, a Kensei and a Samurai (the Emperor’s own nephew). It was important that sword was found because an upstart noble had gathered the strength politically to make himself Emperor when the current Emperor died, thus breaking the 800 year continuous bloodline. The party survived many trials and perils and in the end recovered the sword. With his dying breath the Emperor named his nephew as heir. In the end in was revealed that the Noble was backed by the original natives of Igano, who had formed their own Ninja clanas a mean to gain revenge against the barbarians that supplanted them. With that Kaneda Masaki assumed the mantle of Emperor and long did he reign.